Even Waugh charity cannot help this lot

England, achieving consistency if not excellence, maintained their form of recent weeks and contrived to lose their fifth match on the trot and their seventh in all on this tour yesterday, this time to the Prime Minister's XI. The winter, which has been wretched for some time, is starting to look calamitous.

The day carried with it an amateurish air with the local side playing in white, as protocol demands, and England, whose Test match outfits are in Perth, in their blue uniforms. As a further touch the PM's side batted in green pads so that the umpires would pick out the white ball against them.

England carried on the theme. They put up one of their more gormless displays - injudicious batting when the conditions were crying out for circumspection and off-line bowling when they screamed even louder for direction.

Only when the two Academy boys, Gareth Batty and Chris Read - neither of them yet qualified to have his name on his back but playing above their station - were pulling the innings round from 85 for seven with an urgent and sensible eighth-wicket stand of 61 did the England innings take on any semblance of structure or order.

Even then, though, there was a feeling of charity as Mark Waugh, captaining the home team, opted not to try to finish things off quickly by bringing back his pair of opening bowlers. When he did decide that enough was enough, the aggressive pace bowler Michael Lewis had the job done in a trice.

Nothing should be taken away from the select side, however, who played, as do all Australian teams, especially those containing players with statements to make, with passion and energy to win by four wickets in a match reduced by overnight rain to 42 overs per side.

The pitch offered disconcertingly low bounce from one end in particular - 152 could have been defendable - and James Kirtley managed three wickets in his first five overs to leave the PM's side 37 for three. The Queensland all-rounder Lee Carseldine, though, was selecting his strokes intelligently, making 46 before ambition got the better of him, and Waugh, off the mark with a silky cover drive, batted with customary composure for his 42 until the match was all but won and he gave Batty a memorable first wicket for England.

But the acting England captain Marcus Trescothick appeared to have missed a trick by not bowling his tallest man Andy Caddick into the end with the subterranean bounce and the game was over with more than 10 overs to spare.

With the first one-day international of the winter only two days away, England appear to be no nearer understanding what their best side is nor how strategies must change according to the conditions. Nasser Hussain, Ronnie Irani, Alec Stewart and Steve Harmison were all omitted and at least the first three presumably will play against Australia in Sydney on Friday evening.

Owais Shah at least dug in and spent 18 overs scoring 20 and has a claim of sorts. But Trescothick, Nick Knight and Craig White gifted wickets by heaving mightily at deliveries that deserved greater respect; Paul Collingwood edged to Waugh at slip, which is as near certain a demise as there can be in cricket; Ian Blackwell, dropped second ball, pulled to midwicket and Andy Flintoff charged down the pitch, wafted mightily, and was bowled.

One problem England are facing is their schedule - this match is first and foremost a politician's photo opportunity and, if it is to be played at all, it should be the first warm-up, not the last before a one-day international. Whoever it was who approved the itinerary -and Duncan Fletcher must be one - is culpable of bad judgment.

More fundamentally, the problem appears to be one of assessment, the capacity to see a surface, abruptly to have some idea of what would represent a good score and then to set out to attain what is realistically achievable.

Where are the brains? The standards of running between the wickets, of rotating the strike, of bringing the field in and creating gaps, and just general shot selection have gone down the pan. They are lost arts and, if these and other disciplines are not rediscovered, the forthcoming one-day series and the World Cup that follows could prove the biggest embarrassment of all.